A revolution for nothing
in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed

The Committed (2021) is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer (2015), a satirical spy novel about a communist sleeper agent enmeshed within the capitalist democratic mission during the tail end of the Vietnam War. The sequel is a confessional reflection by the protagonist, a Vietnamese-French spy who is nameless in the first book, and now refers to himself as Vo Danh, which translates to ‘nameless.’ Vo Danh writes this confession after going through re-education in an Indonesian refugee camp with his best friend and blood brother Bon. They flee to France by boat and arrive in Paris in 1981, just a few days after Bastille Day, the revolutionary day symbolising the beginning of a new democratic regime. The author, Nguyen, arrived in the US as a four-year-old refugee right after the war ended in 1975. He explores the inherent contradictions within ideas of revolution, liberation, anticolonialism, solidarity, refuge, power, and knowledge throughout both novels, but the intellectualised internal tensions are particularly developed in The Committed. The novel critically engages Black anticolonial thought, drawing on Fanon, Césaire, Martin Luther King and more because of France’s colonization of Algeria, which is peripheral yet essential to the novel when critiquing the racialisation and hierarchy of colonized peoples at a time of “liberté, egalité, and fraternité” gaining momentum in the newly independent colonies. Among the many avenues of reflection, this essay will focus primarily on how the protagonist reflects on the demand for commitment to anticolonial revolution and what that entails. This paper analyses four moments in the novel which critically deconstructs notions of international solidarity, the inevitability of violence, agency in nonexistence, and universalisation of humanity. Holistically, the idea of nothingness serves as the eventual guiding principle for revolution.

In the current geopolitical context of record high refugees and displaced peoples across the globe, this novel speaks to a broader context of ideological contradictions within revolutionary movements and individuals. The extension of the protagonist’s mental turmoil to real world politics throughout this novel is intentional by Nguyen. The novel, as an art form, presents a unique opportunity to explore the internal landscape of characters. Nguyen’s critiques of US imperialism are personified in characters like Man, the eschatological muscle, Bon, or Maoist Phd, to name a few, who find themselves in situations where their ideology and positionality in the grand scheme of revolution are explored. In an interview to promote this novel with France 24, Nguyen draws on the similarities between the fall of Saigon and the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021 (France 24 English 2021). The US had persistently intervened in the country, only to flee at the end and leave behind innocent bystanders. The extremely chaotic American evacuation that happened in Kabul is just as chaotic as the evacuation in Saigon written in the preceding novel, The Sympathizer. Nguyen draws on contemporary examples of Palestine, Afghanistan, Cambodia and more, along with his own familial experiences as refugees, to inform his writing about the experiences of displaced people embroiled within ideological revolutions and wars.

International solidarity

Citing Black freedom fighters and anticolonialists, Vo Danh engages in conversation with ideas written by Black scholars to judge his own anticolonialism and the sanitization of revolution. In one critical moment, a Cambodian sex worker alerts Vo Danh and the circle of communist intellectuals he finds himself among, of the mass graves discovered from the Khmer Rouge. She directly points to Vo Danh, saying it is the Vietnamese who attacked her country, as they both stare at the newspaper in grief. This inspires a lengthy debate amongst the intellectuals about anticolonialism and the commitment to revolution. A lawyer that recently returned from Cambodia asserts that Pol Pot is a “scapegoat” for people to blame, and highlights the fact that Ho Chi Minh “became a saint by murdering all his enemies to the left and to the right of him, including the anarchists” and “purged his competition” (Nguyen 2021, 196). She continues to say that the Vietnamese revolution needed to be purified of “the insufficiently ideological anticolonialists” and that the leftists in France “romanticize the Vietnamese communists. They sanitize Ho Chi Minh so that they, too, will be clean” (Nguyen 2021, 197). The French politician BFD, from a family of communist revolutionaries described as “ideologically diluted, a rosé socialist” by Vo Danh, chimes in to say “Cambodia has become Vietnam’s Vietnam” (Nguyen 2021, 198). Carrying on the conversation about defending ‘terrorists’ like Pol Pot, a Palestinian freedom fighter’s trial is brought into the mix, prompting the lawyer to ask “Who kills more people, a freedom fighter or a nation-state?” (Nguyen 2021, 198). Vo Danh reflects on this debate by thinking about his own positionality, saying that the ideal situation for an anti-imperialist was to live in a former imperialist nation and reap the benefits of their imperialism, where the US comes in as the best destination and France being second. He asks himself, “was my reluctance to continue subscribing to Césaire and Fanon’s vision of violence as being inevitable in the struggle against colonization a sign of theoretical revision on my part, based on my revolutionary experience? Or was it simply an excuse to justify my reluctance to commit in the way they saw commitment, as a demand for violent uprising?” (Nguyen 2021, 210).

There are three key takeaways in the above interaction between the leftist intellectuals. First, the assumed moral cleanliness of revolution. Descriptors like ‘saint’ and ‘purge’ characterize actors and ideas to be on a scale of moral purity, where, in order to maintain its moral purity, one must erase existential threats. An aura of moral exceptionalism, underscored by Christian values, is mobilized by revolutionaries in Vietnam. However, their direct actions are rationally no different from those of oppressive forces. Vo Danh identifies early in the novel, Ideological State Apparatuses versus Repressive State Apparatuses, which are assumed to be different from each other, but in practice, ideology needs to be enforced through repressive mechanisms, whether it be capitalism or communism (Nguyen 2021, 55). These repressive mechanisms manifest themselves in state sanctioned violence in response to revolution, which is the second takeaway. Whether a state is democratic or not, revolution is met with deadly state violence, as represented in the lawyer’s question about the Palestinian figure. Labels of freedom fighter, terrorist, or revolutionary depend on the relationship between the state and the subject. These relationships are malleable, as the freedom fighting revolutionaries in one moment can become the oppressive forces in another, blurring the differentiation between the nation-state and its subjects that are acting on its behalf. If Vietnam was fighting against US and French interference, what does it mean for them to become the interfering force in Cambodia? Is it then always a power struggle between weakened and powerful states? Power depends on context. Vietnam may not be as powerful as the US, but they can clearly inflict just as much damage if the state finds it necessary. Then where does the moral cleanliness of the Vietnamese revolutionaries go? These are the types of questions the novel tackles when connecting anticolonial struggles across borders to highlight the systemic contradictions in ideological revolutions. These reflections made in the context of the 1980s resonate deeply with contemporary politics of US imperialism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Nguyen blurs the lines between borders and time to show the persistence of these tensions of commitment to ideologies, the nation, and the self in a moment of meta-critique. What does it mean to be committed to democracy or communism if that commitment is practiced through destruction, in the novel, in reality, in the past and in the present? Vo Danh is accused of not being communist enough by his ‘aunt’ who brings these intellectuals in the scene together. That accusation is laced with what Vo Danh says is ‘armchair revolution’ thought, as only those with the privilege of being passive witnesses expect full commitment to the revolutionary cause. He considers this expectation to be hypocritical because of the dependency between ideology and repression when exercised by any nation state, regardless of ideological commitment. Commitment, then, is an excuse, a scapegoat, a distraction from the zero-sum mentality of politics and anticolonial revolution.

Lastly, the inevitability of violence in anticolonialism expressed by Fanon and Césaire is the third takeaway. In this moment, however, Vo Danh identifies a critical juncture in his own reimagination of what it means to be a revolutionary. Refusing to participate in the way revolution has been designed to be practiced is a moment of reclaiming his agency and attempt to decolonise the cycle of violence within anticolonialism. Of course, this moment is reflected in a confession after a gruelling time at the re-education camp. But as a man of two minds, with two holes in his head, and with two ethnic origins as he keeps repeating throughout the book, he finds that anticolonialism expressed by democratic or communist revolution has both demanded either assimilation or erasure. Nguyen highlights how Fanon and Césaire speak to a broader context of radical Black thought and anticolonialism, which has a forced transcontinental element to it because of severed connections due to the slave trade. Although there are major similarities among anticolonialism and decolonization between Asia and Africa, on a racial level, there is not that cross border solidarity in revolution as Vo Danh assumed there would be. There is an inherent hierarchy and privilege within racialised people which happens to be benefitting him in France. Solidarity is only beneficial if it serves the revolution, once the revolution is over, solidarity tends to dissipate according to his observations. Violence does not need revolution, but revolution needs violence, why? Pol Pot to Vo Danh, is the embodiment of Fanon’s point that “the colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor” (Nguyen 2021, 121). Vo Danh definitely does not have an answer. All he knows, is that at the end of the day, as long as “Le Chinois”, the Arab, or the African exists—as abstractions—so does the notion of servitude and superiority (Nguyen 2021, 59). Vo Danh calls out this logic early in the novel saying, “even among the unwanted there were unwanted” and if one were to ask “humanity’s eternal question of why? It was, and is, simply this: why not?” (Nguyen 2021, xii). The ironies of war and revolution are there for a reason because “if you had gone through reeducation like I had, under the hands of a master revolutionary theorist like Man, you would understand that nothing is contradictory, like everything meaningful—love and hate, capitalism and communism, France and America. Leave it to the simple-minded to understand only one side of a contradiction” (Nguyen 2021, 49). As long as servitude and superiority exist, there will always be a demand for freedom and equality. There is a dependency between the fight for liberty and the existence of oppressive structures, whether zoomed in to the local level, or zoomed out on the global level.

Nonexistence and universalising the human

Dreaming, imagination, and death are components of nonexistence which serve as resources for reconstruction. Part 2 of the novel, entitled ‘Myself,’ begins with Vo Danh taking ‘the remedy,’ i.e. a chemical drug that sends everyone to ‘heaven.’ His descent into ‘hell’ has just begun. He sees Martin Luther King Jr in front of him drawing him in by saying “I have a dream!” This imagination is cut short by a Vietnamese motorcyclist driving right in front of MLK, who Vo Danh identifies as “Le Duan, general secretary of the Communist Party! Ho Chi Minh’s successor! One of the founding fathers of our reunified country! A truly committed man!” (Nguyen 2021, 87). The juxtaposition of visualising a revolutionary, a man the Vietnamese communists revered ride a Honda Dream—a combination of Japanese and American imperialism in one commodity—is a comical moment in Vo Danh’s reflection of the outcome of revolution. Vo Danh’s version of Le Duan—in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019)-esque satirical nature—of imagining and conversing with political leaders, says “I am the magician who took the upper half of our country and sewed it back onto the lower half of our country! And then I gave it the iron backbone of our revolution, so that it could stand up for itself! And then I dug around in a graveyard and found a brain for our new creation! So what if the brain came from a foreigner, Karl Marx? Let’s not be racist here” (Nguyen 2021, 88).

A linkage is drawn between the foreign import of ideologies that shaped the Vietnam War, the American dream (i.e. democracy and capitalism), and the German import (i.e. Marx and revolution). Thinking about ideologies as commodities that have fluctuating demand and supply with international stakeholders is an interesting point of contradiction that the protagonist struggles with. The war in his country that resulted in losing his family, his comrades, and his home was ultimately a battle between foreign ideologies that have artificially resonated with his country's people and anticolonialists across the world. Artificiality is not necessarily a harmful thing; what matters is the practice of these ideologies. It is in death that a revolutionary idea came to hold. Digging around implies a desperate search for something that will fit with the sociopolitical conditions of the country. Marx’s ideas of communism lie in the graveyard of unachieved potential, a graveyard filled with bodies of the Indochinese and their hope (or lack thereof) for a brighter future. Death, then, is not an ending point, but rather a resource. But like any resource, if exploited, it leads to sustained civil unrest and foreign vested interests in its outcome. Reunification and ideological commitment is portrayed as a Frankenstein-like concoction that only partially operates as intended, just like Vo Danh (Nguyen 2021, 81).

Vo Danh finds the most power and agency in his nonexistence in the world by engaging in silence. The language used to ask the questions he asks, in ‘Americanese’ as he calls it, is an imperial language. It locks the mind into an imperial way of thinking and navigating the world. As a mixed race person, the language he uses as he fights in a revolution is neither that of his motherland, or his father’s land. It is the language of democratic imperialism. When speaking to BFD, he acknowledges that BFD hears “both the language of American imperialism and the dying echo of a lost French imperialism” (Nguyen 2021, 199). He, as a French-Vietnamese individual, does not exist within his linguistic barriers. During one of the tensest scenes of the book ahead of Part 3, Vo Danh is held at gunpoint in a game of Russian roulette to give up his comrades, but he survives purely by being silent. In the entire chapter dedicated to this intense moment, each click of the gun is followed by desperate contemplation by both of Vo Danh’s minds. Shifting between individual and collective pronouns, he is fighting himself and his memories, trying to figure out how to survive. After six clicks of the gun and three pages saying ‘the end’ in Vietnamese, French, and English, he survives because the gangsters didn’t insert the bullet with the name Vo Danh on it. Laughing and trembling, he thinks to himself, “A man with no name could not be killed by a bullet with his name on it” (Nguyen 2021, 166). He survived because he did not exist, and he did not speak. If we were to extend this logic to the Vietnam War and its revolutionaries, the communists won despite the intention and follow through of the US’s intervention because they did not exist as fully human, and did not have a voice that was heard. Vo Danh articulates that his life goal was to be human, which was his first mistake (Nguyen 2021, 45). On the one hand, those who were never deemed human enough dreamt and fought for their humanity. On the other hand, through the process of achieving their recognition as human by the colonizers, humanity loses its meaning. What it means to be human is directly linked with the denial of humanity, with the existence of those nonhumans. When humanity becomes universal, it can be taken for granted and becomes a commodity to be capitalised on, resulting in comrades fighting comrades. It is in that brief period of nonexistence as a nonhuman that one has the most power to fight back, in front of the barrel and as a society.

Universalisation of humanity does not include the oppressive experience in the eyes of the French. Vo Danh and BFD get into a heated argument about the ‘inscrutability’ of colonized people. Vo Danh pointedly asks BFD if White people are ever called “inscrutable” the same way non-White people are called that. The incomprehensibility of White logic is deemed strategic rather than inscrutable. This question triggers BFD, prompting him to accuse Vo Danh of being a “communitarian! A miserabilist! Someone who wallows in his misery, who cannot transcend the petty circumstances of his identity or his obsession with skin colour, who cannot think outside of his little group, his community, and who can never ever just be human, much less universal!” (Nguyen 2021, 216). Vo Danh is immediately shocked at this accusation of intentionally otherising himself from being human because he actively recognises the misery he and his people have suffered at the hands of the colonizer. He barks back to say, “if Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society’s leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I” (Nguyen 2021, 217). The new universal, in an era of decolonization, is a universal that does not make space for the historical racial, ethnic, religious, and classist oppressive structures within society and governance. The new, inclusive and universal human must forget the mistakes of the past to imagine a new future, but the act of forgetting is a privilege the colonizers have. Forgetting injustices is an act of continuous erasure in the name of assimilation and inclusion. Nguyen, highlights the stark difference between the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the US, where he grew up as a refugee, versus in France, as in the novel, because of this pressure to become the French human rather the Vietnamese human—i.e. someone who lives in the memory of the miseries inflicted upon them. Remembering and moving forward are understood as mutually exclusive by BFD. Mentioning Jesus was provocative, but necessary to expose the hypocrisy and whitewashing of history which privileges colonial legacies and memory, and persists in BFD’s eurocentric logic of humanity.

Ultimately, what is the point of the revolution and the revolutionary? Vo Danh’s answer is nothing. Nothing is the end goal of revolution. Nothing is a state of being, but also an attainable target for the hopeless. Making nothing something is an act of revolution itself (Nguyen 2021, 62). It is in nothingness that we can imagine otherwise. After confessing to Bon that he is a communist, Bon kills him and himself, and the narrator’s pronouns change from ‘I’ to ‘You’ for the remainder of the book. This shift in perspective is a direct address to the reader, but also a chance to think again, when he is now in death and there is nothing. In the epilogue, the protagonist reflects on the 700-page confession he just wrote and asserts that nothing is the only thing he is committed to. He reflects, “who knew your life warranted this many words, you, a nobody who believes in nothing? But then again, most people are nobodies. Most of these nobodies may believe in God, but they are not so different from you. They also believe in nothing, except that they refuse to admit it. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is everywhere, just like God, for whom nothing is only another name. Nothing can bring back the dead, who come from nothing and return to nothing. No, nothing can be done, except for this, the words you have written” (Nguyen 2021, 334). The true universal experience, if the universal is nonhuman, is the commitment to nothing. To imagine otherwise in an uneven playing field, where the persecuted aim to become the persecutors in a perpetual cycle of violence, is committing to further violence. In a world of ideological and systemic contradictions that demand commitment, commitment to nothing is the ultimate revolutionary act, which challenges the normative principles of global ideological hegemony. Nguyen teases out the methodological gaps and inconsistencies of revolution in ideology and practice in The Committed to tell a story not just about a man, but of a dream, fight, and hope, for nothing.

Disclaimer: This work is original and the property of Aroni Sarkar. It is not authorised for any use, copies or dissemination.

Works Cited

2021. A man of two faces: Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen returns with 'The Committed' • FRANCE 24 English. Directed by France 24 English. Performed by France 24 English. Youtube. Accessed April 25, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzKEFas38o&ab_channel=FRANCE24English.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2021. The Committed. London: Corsair.